Fun in the Sun

"Doctor," I call over my shoulder, "you might want to put something a bit more substantial on." Out of the corner of my eye, and thankfully not in line of sight of the TARDIS doors, I see her cock her hip as she stops walking towards me in her red slingshot bikini and sandals. "Did I not get the coordinates right or something," she asks. I look out of the doors again and reply. "No, no, you got those dead on," I say, looking at the man opposite me, "it's just, the Caribbean in the early eighteenth century has certain... implications." The Doctor struts up next to me, takes one look out the door and makes a small noise of concern. "Are we quite done with this farce," John Rackham, better known as 'Calico Jack', asks tiredly - laser pistol still pointed unerringly at my face.

Thankfully, the Doctor took the time to throw on a shirt and a long skirt before coming to the door, or else this might be even more awkward. The TARDIS takes up a not-insignificant fraction of the deck, with most of Rackham's crew having crowded down the other end to get away from the wheezing, groaning blue box rapidly fading into existence in front of their eyes - which is, y'know, pretty reasonable. What I find less reasonable is the eclectic variety of energy weapons mixed in among the usual muskets, blunderbusses and pistols I was expecting when I realised I'd just opened the door onto the deck of a pirate ship. The Doctor seems to have persuaded - read: browbeaten - them not to kill us for a moment on the basis that nobody else can operate our ship and that it has a wide variety of defenses that would give them all excruciating deaths if anything were to happen to us.

Rackham, living down to his historical reputation, is all smiles and carefully non-offensive language. Or at least, he is until I remark how surprising it is to see him standing in front of his entire crew. A quick explanation that it was honest surprise - on account of it being normal for such the important members of the crew not to put themselves immediately in harm's way - and a reminder that pirates normally don't harm unresistant prisoners quickly soothe his ego and calm the crew, though the downside is that we're now officially prisoners. "If I might be so bold," I ask the captain, "where did you get such impressive armaments? I can't imagine their former owners gave them up willingly - or easily, looking at them."

He gives me a look that says he knows I'm flattering him shamelessly, but that he doesn't care. "Well," he replies, "it certainly wasn't easy..."

Another of the bizarre creatures stumbled into John's path, burning from head to foot, and he hacked down on its neck with his cutlass. The blow didn't quite take the thing's head, but it certainly killed it - and, far more importantly, the motion put his head out of the way of a bright, thin beam of light as it flickered in the air. He saw one of his men vanish in a spray of glowing green dust, then heard the shooter's gurgling scream as Mary shot it in turn. Another two of them burst out of the treeline, but a group of men who'd been sheltering nearby broke cover and set upon them with knives and clubs.

"Back to the boats, back to the boats," he called, stuffing the now burnt-out creature's pistol into his belt, "grab what you can and go!" He spotted Anne and another of the men - Patrick, if what he could see through the haze of gunsmoke was true - pause by one of the near-dead ones and stab it a few times, then grab the entire thing and start hauling it to the ship's boats that others were even now pushing back into the surf. A few gunshots rang out, along with the strange shrieking of the monsters' own weapons - going both ways now, as his crew decided to test their stolen arms on the dark figures moving amongst the trees...

"By the time we'd realised they were there, they'd already killed two of us and blown apart one of the boats with some queer-looking grenade. Terrible fighters, though," Rackham opines, "didn't seem to know how to take cover or how to turn with a blow." He pauses for a moment. "Then again, with weapons like that they may just never have seen any point in learning how." One of the men now cautiously making their way down from the other end of the ship gives a snort of laughter, and Rackham glares at him. "As I was saying," he continues, "they weren't up to much when we got in amongst them, so we killed off the ones keeping us from the boats, bundled up as much of their kit as we could carry and left the squalid little place to them."

"We did more than that," protests a young pirate with red hair, before Rackham shushes him- Wait, I think, nobody else is keeping their short so loose-fitting except for... I reassess the situation. Rackham shushes her, and gestures for the rest of the crew to return to work. "Come with me," he orders in a low voice, as the Anne Bonny takes up position behind us with one hand on the hilt of her blade and the other pointing her own alien pistol in our vague direction. The Doctor has an easier time of it than me, since she barely needs to duck under the low doorways we pass through, but we're eventually ushered into the... the little room at the stern they shove sick people into... lazarette, that's the word. We're eventually ushered into the lazarette.

"I'm a little surprised to hear a woman, especially one of your," Rackham looks the Doctor up and down, much to Bonny's irritation, "temperament, referred to as a Doctor. But if you are, and given that your vessel appeared out of thin air on the deck of a moving ship, maybe you can tell me what this is." He tugs the sheet off of a shape on one of the benches and both he and I instinctively take a step back at the smell that wafts up. Bonny's standing far enough away not to need more than a slight wrinkling of the nose to express how she feels, and the Doctor doesn't seem to notice as she bends over the corpse to examine it. "Well, for starters," she says, in a way that I feel is a bit patronising to our captors, "it's not local." The lipless mouth full of razor-sharp teeth and the conical, 'gator-skinned head are a slight giveaway, in my opinion.

Bonny rolls her eyes and thumbs one of the buttons on the back of her gun. "Looks like a Hoix, or a close relative, but I'm not sure what these implants are... Did they try and fight you up close? Biting, mauling, any of that?" Rackham looks at Bonny, who shakes her head. "No," he replies, "or if they did, neither of us saw it. Seems damned odd, looking at them." The Doctor hums in agreement, and then the sonic screwdriver is suddenly in her hand and humming as she runs it over the bits of metal studded into the thing's head. "That'd do it," she remarks, glancing at the display, "they would've been practically brain-dead. Someone scooped out big chunks of it and replaced it with computer implants."

"Some sort of full sized clockwork soldier? Ridiculous," Rackham mutters. Bonny lets out a short, harsh bark of laughter. "More than this-" She gestures with her gun for emphasis. "-or any of the other stuff we grabbed off them? More than some bloody cabinet appearing out of nothing? Come off it, Jack." I can see her eyes flicking down involuntarily to the Doctor's ass, swaying back and forth as she works, and can't help but smirk. Suddenly, the entire ship lurches to one side and sends us all stumbling - Rackham and Bonny less so, but still enough to be noticeable, which doesn't say great things about what's going on outside.

Getting up on deck, the situation doesn't look any better - chiefly due to the massive, tentacled dinosaur-looking creature shunting the whole ship sideways through the water at an alarming speed. Various pirates are shooting down into the water at it, but the bullets and beams don't seem to leave more than shallow cuts on its hide, if they even hit it at all. A dark-haired pirate in the same sort of loose-fitted shirt as Anne Bonny takes their time to aim, and plugs the thing right in the eye with a musket ball as its head breaks the surface. "You know," the Doctor murmurs from beside me as we back against the opposite side of the deck, "I honestly forgot she was in the army."

I don't have time to appreciate the trivia, however, because we're now on a sandbar. There are a couple of ways to tell, but the chief one is that we've gone from 'going sideways very quickly' to 'dead stop' and several men have just been hurled screaming into the sea by momentum. The other way is that I can see it through the surface of the crystal-clear water rushing up to meet me, on account of being one of those men.